"Once upon a time, there was a blog...."oh wait this isn't a fairytale.

Ahem..."Two score and seventeen years ago..."hmmm I'm not technically at war (well at least not with another nation state) and the only burial plot I need to dedicate will be my roommate's garden if I fail to water it while she is at Girl's camp (oh and my own, she'll kill me if it's dead when she gets home).

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." I think we have a winner. You can always count on Dickens to give you a good opener. Something solid to capture the readers and so concisely describe the matters at hand. Although I should add a critical caveat here: remember the theory of relativity. Now, before you give me more credit than I deserve, I'm not talking Einstein here. It's my own theory, or rather the reality of relativity...not a concept I created, just one that we all learn sooner or later, if we live long enough.

This theory of relativity is this, that: the 'best' and 'worst' are all relative and dependent on timing and experience. For example, I vividly remember walking out into the foyer of the Harold B. Lee Library on BYU campus at the end of my first year of business school. I was racked with anguish over the fact that I didn't have an internship at the end of the year. I left a study session to take a phone call...another rejection. I remember the feelings of disappointment as poignantly as if I was living that moment now. It felt like the 'worst' of times....

Nearly five years later, I walked back into that library and found myself standing in the exact same spot waiting to meet my brother.... Like today, then, I was flooded with the memory of missing internship and the heartache I felt and yet standing there, waiting for my brother, I found myself yearning for that simple, momentary, resolvable anguish of no internship. It was so simple and the pain was (relatively speaking) so trivial. In the intervening five years I left a man I loved, who asked me to marry him over and over, I was unemployed for almost a year and I was diagnosed with a chronic, debilitating illness. Suddenly the anguish of an undefined internship and the security of being in school, healthy and free of heartbreak seemed like the 'best' of times...and I wanted them back. So that moment in my life is now both a 'worst' and a 'best'...merely dependent on time and experience.

So as I embark on this new adventure of a blog, as the 'best' or 'worst of anything I must say that there will be other 'bests' and 'worsts' but how and when they are defined are not nearly as important as how and when I let them define me. Reflecting on the past, both distant and near, I have been better at some times than others at being defined by my 'bests' and 'worsts'. My prayer is that I will become better at both the 'bests' and the 'worsts' and letting them mold me.

So with that introduction, I'm going to give this my 'best' effort....